Gift cards have become increasingly popular in recent years, and racks containing gift cards for various merchants are commonplace at grocery stores, convenience stores, street vendors, and other locations. One person pays the merchant (or a distributor marketing gift cards for the merchant) a specified amount of money for the gift card and gives the gift card to another person (the recipient or holder of the gift card) as a gift. The holder of a gift card is then able to purchase, from any merchant associated with that gift card, goods or services costing less than or equal to the monetary value associated with the gift card. Merchants like gift cards because they receive the funds immediately, and the gift-card makes it very likely that the recipient will visit the merchant's store or Web site. Though gift cards have the same value as cash, one disadvantage of conventional gift cards is that the user has to physically present the card to a merchant when using it to make a purchase. This burden is worsened if the card is ever lost because replacement gift cards are generally unavailable.
Attempts have been made to overcome some of the disadvantages of typical plastic, magnetically encoded gift cards. For example, various kinds of electronic gift cards and electronic gift certificates have been developed, but these have their own disadvantages. Specifically, fulfillment can take several days, preventing an electronic-gift-card recipient from making immediate use of the electronic gift card or gift certificate. Also, electronic gift cards stored in the holder's mobile device (e.g., a cellular telephone) make the mobile device an enticing target for theft.
A system and method is thus needed to overcome the inherent limitations of conventional physical and electronic gift cards.